00:07:26 · Dan Lifshits, Ilia Drozdov, Sebastian Johnson
[00:07:26] S1: Yeah. Enormous. [00:07:27] S2: I think opportunity is enormous. And hopefully, next time we speak, we will be kind of much more than 1,000,000,000 GMV. Currently, we are around 500,000,000 in dollars, kind of in pounds. It's around three fifty kind of million GMV rent roll. But kind of the overall market is 5,000,000 properties. And we are just approaching kind of whatever 20 as Dan said. So we are less than half percent of the market just in The UK. And the whole Europe is at least five times bigger than The UK, and US is, like, doubling kind of the overall size of Europe, including The UK. So the opportunity to build trillion dollar business here on the table. [00:08:04] S1: To to give a bit of a sense of the figure, so kind of there is just about 20,000 agents in The UK alone. And all agencies transact, kind of the total rental, total GMV, around 100,000,000,000 per year. So, kind of commission is around 10%, implying that the total market is kind of somewhere around 10,000,000,000 in The UK alone. So I think in The UK, you can build pretty easy kind of a few billion IRR business over the kind of course of the next few years. They're probably already in The UK alone would be a multi decker business, like $3,050,000,000,000 worth as a company. Definitely So it's an opportunity to build one of the largest consumer businesses in Europe. [00:08:38] S0: And and is that the focus? Is there a certain stage that you wanna get to a certain market saturation you want to get to in The UK before you start looking to Europe?
00:08:38 · Sebastian Johnson, Ilia Drozdov, Dan Lifshits
[00:08:38] S0: And and is that the focus? Is there a certain stage that you wanna get to a certain market saturation you want to get to in The UK before you start looking to Europe? [00:08:47] S2: Good. No. I think enough for us actually kind of scaling across Europe goes kind of slightly independent from the market share in The UK. For us, the key kind of criteria to go abroad is to make sure that UK market is set on the upward trajectory without, let's say, our personal involvement. And I think we are quite close to that. Like, we internally call it the market should be GMable, where kind of already leadership and the team... Senior leadership and the team can drive further kind of execution of the strategy, and we can start kind of testing the the company in terms of consuming kind of additional markets. Obviously, it's not only our own focus. It's also kind of the readiness of the technology and technological platform itself because kind of going into the market with different language, different legislation, etcetera etcetera requires additional effort. And for now, kind of the balance is still towards kind of improving the system for The UK purposes. But I think we are quite close to to being able to prioritize international expansion as well. [00:09:44] S1: You don't want to go with The UK to build an enormous business. Even in The UK, they're a pretty iconic company. But I think that next time we'll talk, we definitely already would be talking about that, and it'd a more practical term.
00:09:44 · Dan Lifshits, Sebastian Johnson, Ilia Drozdov
[00:09:44] S1: You don't want to go with The UK to build an enormous business. Even in The UK, they're a pretty iconic company. But I think that next time we'll talk, we definitely already would be talking about that, and it'd a more practical term. [00:09:54] S0: Amazing. And can I ask what's the big bottleneck at the moment? Right? Because it doesn't seem to be capital. You seem to be well stocked with capital. Is it talent? Is it potential, you know, acquisition companies? Is it time to integrate? What is the thing that's stopping you from getting to 20, 50, a 100,000? [00:10:10] S1: I would say hiring. [00:10:11] S2: I agree with Dan that it's hiring. And I think, you know, we're in a very lucky position that kind of as not first time founders, we purposefully decided to avoid a product market basically challenge. So the... Like, I mean, there is no need for a product market fit in our case because we are significantly improving already existing products and customers understand what they
00:10:11 · Ilia Drozdov, Dan Lifshits
[00:10:11] S2: I agree with Dan that it's hiring. And I think, you know, we're in a very lucky position that kind of as not first time founders, we purposefully decided to avoid a product market basically challenge. So the... Like, I mean, there is no need for a product market fit in our case because we are significantly improving already existing products and customers understand what they [00:10:29] S1: are buying, etcetera, etcetera. So for us kind of to execute at really fast pace, the biggest bottleneck is hiring. And I would say primarily you're talking about operators and product engineering talent. Because, like, effectively what we built is yet another quite operational tech enabled business. So meaning that all your typical kind of operators of the world, the typical Ubers and deliveries and the others, people that like operational businesses growing at high pace. And I think on the product engineering front, it's also gonna help for everyone. We're competing for the engineers a lot with labs and with other application companies. But I think what we see is that this specific type of engineer that likes to kind of take some operational process, write a few lines of code, and then see how the automation of the real world happens. So I think it's almost like we would have some engineers that were big fans in the childhood of automating some stuff. And we just see this genuine joy, almost like as a kid in a candy store when you're kinda seeing what the frontier of the applied AI looks like. And they're like, wow. I couldn't believe that it can be happened.
00:11:30 · Ilia Drozdov
[00:11:30] S2: My my question to most of the engineers kind of at the last stage of the interview process is pretty much following. Look. And if you need to decide for yourself what excites you more, whether kind of you want to be more of a scientist that is kind of, you know, thinking about particular kind of idea, particular solution, like months, if not years, and then solves a very kind of very difficult task and just get an... Get a joy from it. Or you're different kind of extreme where, again, if you you're just excited about walking on the streets, seeing basically a light in windows and people having nice dinners. And, you know, given that 25% of people live in their rental homes, particularly kind of joy and quietness during the evening, supplied to some extent by us because all the maintenance was dealt kind of automatically. There are no issues, etcetera, etcetera. Because obviously, kind of experience around rental home quite quite kind of fundamental for the for the happiness of life. And we we do input that, we hope to believe. And engineers should be kind of understanding in which camp they are because we're obviously not a frontier lab. We will not be providing tasks kind of... For you to be kind of a mathematician like person walking on the streets kind of and thinking about it twenty four seven, but we do impact lives twenty four seven, and that's kind of probably the the source of excitement for people.
00:12:49 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:12:49] S0: Now that's amazing. Right? There's there's very clear impacts. If you improve your quality of the product, there's a very real change in the experience of people living in the homes, which I think is amazing. Can we talk about the round itself? So there's a huge round, EQT growth, General Catalyst co led it. What was the round like? I mean, I feel like there's been a shift in the VC mindset towards these types of businesses across Europe more generally. It feels like there's a great opportunity for services led AI transformation companies. Yeah. Have you seen that shift compared to when you first rang... Raised your early rounds to to to today? Has that been the biggest driver in raising more money? Has it been the sort of, like, excitement in the VC ecosystem around businesses like yours? Has it been them sort of, like, watching the... You know, like, I know General Katalyst has been involved already. Has it been them watching the business and watching you operate? What was that process like? Just talk to me a bit a bit about it.